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It's not a waiting game, it's a game of poker. Lamar Smith has a royal flush and few people know it.

SOPA may pass. It may not. He doesn't care, and it doesn't matter. The MPAA and RIAA started working on their legislative strategy to pass a new anti-piracy bill in late 2010. SOPA was designed to raise the noise. Everyone is playing right into the entertainment industries hand. The lobbyists are laughing manically at the ignorance of the mob. Even Wikipedia and reddit have played into it.

What people don't know about is the ace: H.R.1981, the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 which is lying in wait. It's not complete. You see, PCIP is not contestable because it's about protecting children. They can, and very well might, copy and paste the full text of SOPA to the end of PCIP. That's the backup. That's the deal that was struck with entertainment industry lobbyists. We will try to push this anti-piracy bill. It probably won't work. Don't worry, we can pass it under an anti-child pornography bill.

There are two things which no Congressman will risk supporting: terrorism and child pornography. There can be no opposition, no discussion. Any anti-piracy law can ALWAYS be reframed as an anti-child pornography bill and it will pass, without even discussion. It will have the full support of the House (minus Ron Paul), the full support of the Senate, and most importantly the full support of the American people. NO ONE wants to risk being called a pedophile.

The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.

We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.

Can we get someone to tack serious tax hikes to this bill too? Hell, add campaign finance reform/anti-lobbying legislation to it - it'll NEVER pass. Watch people reverse their position on child porn...

Amends the federal criminal code to prohibit knowingly conducting in interstate or foreign commerce a financial transaction that will facilitate access to, or the possession of, child pornography.

Adds as predicate offenses to the money laundering statute provisions regarding: (1) such financial facilitation of access to child pornography, (2) obscene visual representation of the abuse of children, and (3) a felony by a registered sex offender involving a minor.

Requires a provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service to retain for at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account unless that address is transmitted by radio communication. Bars any cause of action against a provider for retaining records as required. Makes a good faith reliance on the requirement to retain records a complete defense to a civil action. Expresses the sense of Congress that such records should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent breaches of the records.

Allows the issuance of an administrative subpoena for the investigation of unregistered sex offenders by the United States Marshals Service.

Requires a U.S. district court to issue a protective order prohibiting harassment or intimidation of a minor victim or witness if the court finds evidence that the conduct at issue is reasonably likely to adversely affect the willingness of the minor witness or victim to testify or otherwise participate in a federal criminal case or investigation.

Directs the United States Sentencing Commission to review and amend the federal sentencing guidelines and policy statements to ensure that such guidelines provide an additional penalty for sex trafficking of children and other child abuse crimes.

Imposes a fine and/or prison term of up to 20 years for the possession of pornographic images of a child under the age of 12.

Someone should tell Congress that if they pass this, if they ever had to go to court for something, their entire internet usage for at least the previous 18 months would be accessible. It'd be unanimously thrown out.

I've noticed a common theme regarding posts about HR 1981. I've seen posts about it all the way from r/technology to BoingBoing to Ars Technica. I thought discussion on it had finally died down, but here it is again.

The common theme is that there's a whole lot of smoke, but not a lot of fire.

The relevant parts are Secs. 4, 5, and 6. You can read them over now. While I do find it a bit troubling that this would be included in the middle of a bill about CP, it makes a bit of sense, as ISPs aren't technically required to store information that maps IP addresses to subscribers. However, all sane ISPs do this already, because of the Safe harbor provisions of the DMCA.

While it is possible they might try to push provisions of SOPA/PIPA into this bill, I haven't seen anything that suggests they would. However if they do, you can consider me completely wrong.

PurposeThe hosts file is one of several system facilities that assists in addressing network nodes in a computer network. It is a common part of an operating system's Internet Protocol (IP) implementation, and serves the function of translating human-friendly hostnames into numeric protocol addresses, called IP addresses, that identify and locate a host in an IP network.

In some operating systems, the hosts file content is used preferentially over other methods, such as the Domain Name System (DNS), but many systems implement name service switches (e.g., nsswitch.conf) to provide customization. Unlike the DNS, the hosts file is under the direct control of the local computer's administrator.[1]

File contentThe hosts file contains lines of text consisting of an IP address in the first text field followed by one or more hostnames. Each field is separated by white space (blanks or tabulation characters). Comment lines may be included; they are indicated by a hash character (#) in the first position of such lines. Entirely blank lines in the file are ignored. For example, a typical hosts file may contain the following:

This is an example of the hosts file

127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
::1 localhost
This example only contains entries for the loopback addresses of the system and their hostnames, a typical default content of the hosts file. The example illustrates that an IP address may have multiple hostnames, and that a hostname may be mapped to several IP addresses

-Stolen from blacked out wikipedia because in mother russia, interwebs surf you!

in terms of child pronopgraphy we have to acccept that there are people that fucked up and this is unfortunately going to happen ocassionally.
i am far more concerned with protecting the children that have been abused and catching the guys doing it than with the perverts looking at the pictures.

what i'm saying is that child pornography on the internet is a great thing because the guys abusing kids are going to do it anyway, the internet increases the circulation of these pictures, which in turn greatly increases the chances of finding these kids and getting them out of that situation, and catching the people making comitting these crimes.

we just need a politician with the balls to stand up and something as sensitive as "the internet is great invention for the protection of sexually abused young people."

I never understood the idea that we need to block sites in the name of child pornography!

What? So you're just going to block them and pretend the child pornographers don't exist anymore? Just taking down their website is a pointless action. The reason reason they want an Internet blacklist for this is because they want to use it for other reasons.

Regarding this bill specifically, it's obvious it overreaches so much it's ridiculous. You don't monitor 100 million people in the hopes of catching 100 pedophiles. Such a ridiculous thing to ask for, and again it's obvious they intend to use it for much more than that.

This is the shit that is going on in Canada right now. We have a massive omnibus crime bill being passed through the houses. If you criticize it, you are told you are supporting child porn. It has everything under the sun in it, that the Conservative party couldn't pass on their own for the past few years. It has "Copyright Reform" and harsher sentences for non-violent offences all thrown in with it.

Yeah, Over here in Australia we had a similar Bill try to be passed. It was horrible. Not as bad as SOPA, PIPA or PCIP, but still very, very bad. Guess what the number one hawking point was from our Technology minister, Steve Fielding? (Ad Hominem Attack, but he was also from The Family first party, which was uber Christian and could've been replaced with a gif of Maud from the Simpson shouting "Won't Somebody Think of the children!?", and only got a seat in the government due to deal making.) "It's to Protect the Children/You're basically supporting Child pornography if you oppose the bill!" Never mind the fact that there's more than a few Aussie Politicians who've been caught browsing such content at work.

Fuck but we used to have some stupid as fuck politicians. We still do, but nowhere near as bad as we used to. :/

Yeah, over here in New Zealand we had a similar situation in which our government used emergency 'urgency' powers following the Christchurch earthquake to push through a anti-piracy bill without debate that was shot down previously. Now we've got a 3 strikes system that assumes you are guilty until proven innocent but has only succeeded in making direct download more popular than bittorrent.

I don't know of anybody trying to do anything about it- http://3strikes.net.nz/ has some decent information about how the process works but the crazy thing is that if you are accused of copyright violation by a rights holder, the onus is on you to go through a very convoluted process and somehow prove that you didn't pirate content. And proving that you didn't do something is pretty much impossible.

I'm not a native kiwi so my knowledge of how things work here is pretty limited but I think a new government should be able to throw out the amendment pretty easily if there was support. That said, only the Greens and a few other MPs opposed it when it passed under urgency to begin with. So the main opposition party (Labour) was for it as well.

Wow...I didn't even know there was this other bill, but I am not surprised in the slightest. I remember in my Gov class we made up bills in groups and then tried to put in the most BS clauses in, just to show what craziness can slip under the wire.

This is not just "this other bill". PCIP is the primary bill. That's why it isn't finished.

Whatever can't pass under SOPA will pass under PCIP. If SOPA doesn't pass at all they may literally attach it to the end of PCIP. I mean like stapled to the back of PCIP. This happens all the time. It's one of the reasons we have so many federal laws in this country and why people often do a double take, "I thought Congress struck that down? WTF?"

You know, I thought about this. I have often thought about what would happen if a district representative created an app that let him push notifications out to constituents in real time and get their responses. Can you imagine how amazing a tool that would be in a debate?

Not as much as we would have then. I've met few redditors who know the purpose of the UN (prevent world war), or who know why we bombed Gaddafi but not Assad (because Russia vetoed UN action on Syria). If it were up to the people, we would have an international incident by friday and nuclear war with China and Russia by sunday.

"Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate."- Sun Tzu

You can argue against it. The German government tried to pass a law similar to the anti-child pornography act. There was a huge online opposition to it as it had the potential for uncontrolled censorship. The non-government parties took notice and started working against it with some people among the government supporting them. And that was pretty much the end of that proposed law.

I live in Germany, and I followed the discussions in Bundestag closely.

I remember how the very few who dared to argue against the bill were called disgusting by Government majority parties CDU/CSU.
Look at how it destroyed Tauss's career!

Afairc they actually passed the law then and abolished it now. And imho it only happened because a) the former secretary for families, senior citizens etc. became secretary for work, and neither she or her successor pursued it any further, and b) the new governments second party FDP has civil rights as one of their topics, and back then they actually had some approval and meaning.

We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.

Even if such a thing were created and every techie got on board, Comcast and other big home ISPs would never support it, never configure people's home equipment to work with it, try their best ignore it, and in the end, probably just block it.

The worst thing about all this is that it will kill innovation. Big sites with lots of money (for example Facebook or YouTube) will have the lawyers (and lobbyists) to make sure they can stay up even in the face of something like SOPA. Small startups will not be able to do the same. This means that if a website didn't already exist and make it to the big-time prior to now, it will never exist. SOPA will be the biggest barrier to entry the web has ever known.

We're seriously looking at a future world where if a video gets removed from Youtube it will be gone from public view entirely, because there will be no other video hosting sites. Likewise, if a photo isn't hosted on Facebook, it won't be hosted anywhere. There will never be another major video hosting or social networking site ... ever. If anybody has dreams about starting a web-based business you'd better forget it, because you'll mysteriously find yourself on the wrong end of a copyright takedown (which will take down your whole site) the moment you catch the notice of some big, established player. 1995-2012 was the era of being able to start a new business on the web. After that, it's game over.

Comcast and big ISPs would not need to support it and would not be able to block it. That's the whole point. Comcast doesn't support OpenDNS or Google DNS. In fact, Comcast doesn't support ANY DNS system other than their own.

Comcast and big ISPs would not need to support it and would not be able to block it.

If it's travelling over their network, they can block it. Count on it.

Comcast doesn't support OpenDNS or Google DNS. In fact, Comcast doesn't support ANY DNS system other than their own.

They don't care about OpenDNS or any other alternate DNS at the moment because they are mere curiosities. However, if an alternate DNS suddenly appeared which was clearly trying to be an end run around the copyright censorship system (in which they have a huge vested interest, being a content distributor themselves), they most certainly would try to stop it.

OpenDNS and Google DNS are hardly "mere curiosities". I haven't used my ISPs DNS servers in years. I don't know anyone with an understanding of technology who has. Most IT admins use OpenDNS or Google DNS now. They are not small.

This issue before us is not whether or not it is possible to block traffic. It is always possible to block traffic. The issue is DNS and who owns the internet.

Some dude at Google made a DNS benchmarking tool in their spare time which is pretty good. Run it and you'll get a direct comparison in speed between different DNS providers and your default (usually your ISPs DNS servers).

Take the fastest ones and update your router's DNS settings and all connected machines will then be getting DNS via those instead of whatever your ISP uses.

My primary router has my ISPs DNS server as the primary (as it's way faster than anything else), secondary is GoogleDNS, and tertiary is OpenDNS.

But yeah, leaving your DNS set to use your ISPs servers exclusively is a bad move.

I do kinda trust my ISPs servers though, as they're is a small no-name B2B company, who don't block anything or throttle any ports/protocols. They don't even have any kind of FUP either, just a daytime bandwidth limit between 8am-8pm on weekdays (£1 per GB if you go over). Which I think is great as you always know exactly where you stand at all times.

If it's travelling over their network, they can block it. Count on it.

The easiest thing they could do is block a protocol. Of course then the services can encrypt the protocol. Then the ISPs could take another step, and fingerprint the traffic; that would probably cause false-positives knocking out some critical traffic, but the "bad" stuff could probably still be blocked. Of course, as a result the "bad" services could then figure out how to obfuscate the encrypted traffic to look like otherwise harmless data. Even if the ISPs could figure out how to detect this, they will run the risk of even more false-positives to the point that even user are noticeably affected.

This sort of cat and mouse game can continue until the "bad" services are so advanced that the ISPs run the risk of blocking most, if not all the traffic on their network because it might be for a "bad" service. That, or they might just accept that people will use the internet for whatever the hell they please. Case in point, the Great Firewall of China is one of the most strictly controlled ISPs in the world. Even so, they can not really block something as simple as a Tor connections. Occasionally they might find ways to make it hard to use for a few weeks, but eventually the developers get around that same as any other technical problem.

That should illustrate why the ISPs won't do anything. It's not that they wouldn't want to, but they understand the internet better than most. They are perfectly aware that they best they could do is spend an insane amount of money, manpower, and time on a war that they have no hope of matching, much less winning.

It's easy to be fatalistic in the face of the bad politics of the day, but remember: the people making these decisions are by and large ridiculouslyold: on average over 50 in both houses. At some point these people will die, get voted out by voters angry with the policies of the past few decades, or failing that get hit by the ever growing segment of online savvy populace. The Internet generation is getting older every year, and that means we have more and more pull in every single election. If that doesn't calm you down, then take it from a computer professional working on bleeding edge products, the things you can expect from technology in the next 20 years will make the stuff that's happened in the last 20 years seem like a huge joke.

I have an idea. Could decentralized DNS systems be built into browsers? DNS is controlled at the operating system level, but perhaps a program could be written for each major OS to modify whatever system functionality needs to be updated or replaced, all built into Firefox or Chrome.

If that was possible, you could support decentralized DNS-based top level .name networks transparently. Millions of users could be given access without them even having to know anything about it. Soon, all browsers are forced to support it as it starts taking off.

The question is, is there a major browser out there willing to take a potentially political stand? I wonder...

Well considering Tor runs off aurora,-which IIRC is just a modded version of Firefiox- it seems entirely plausible that Firefox would. Not sure about Chrome though considering it is attached to the Google franchise, and whether they "do no evil" is debatable , they are still in it for the money.

I get that you want to catch people's attention, but let's not get out of hand here. Internet technology hasn't exactly been standing still these past 25 years.

The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.

We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.

The entertainment industry does not actually understand much about the structure internet; yes, they understand that there is such a thing named DNS server, which is a centralized system for resolving domain names, but this far down the line that info really should be common knowledge. The core idea has been in place for over 20 years. The only thing they have figured out is that there is a single, simple target, which they can attack to their heart's content. Such a simplification presents the illusion that the problem can be addressed.

That said, there is nothing fundamentally flawed about a centralized DNS system. First of, no one is stopping people from running their own DNS servers. We are not actually obligated to take hints from the global root nameservers, so if enough people outside US jurisdictions accept alternate servers then the entire problem is solved by changing your router DNS config. Sure, we might lose easy to remember numbers like 8.8.8.8, but that is not really such a huge problem.

Second, a decentralized DNS is not just a theoretical solution which could be put into place with a lot of work. Implementations already exist, and are actively used. Yes, these services could be optimized for the mainstream public, but that is merely a matter of user interface and optimization. Both problems that can be solved in reasonably short order using modern techniques. Rest assured that the day this sort of bill passes will be the day this sort of software becomes the part of any standard install.

What more, because of the huge mass of users and bandwidth such actions will force into these decentralized networks, the results could revolutionize the entire system such that it becomes usable for normal browsing and file sharing, not just the things you want kept anonymous. The result? You are right that the internet as we know it may not exist in 5 or 10 years. Instead, just by trying to brute force an unsolvable problem, the entertainment industry may end up creating an environment that will make policing piracy (Or any online traffic) utterly impossible.

So tell me again that they've finally caught up with technology. I need another laugh.

Decentralized DNS itself not difficult. Anyone can host a DNS server. The problem is two fold:

(1) That there is a "single" DNS server that can be shut down or blocked.
(2) Decentralized DNS creates a problem of "authenticity", which is already a problem. It will be more and more difficult to tell if https://mybank.com is actually going to the IP address for mybank.com, and not a rouge site.

The frontrunner for an immediate solution is something similar to Bitcoin, where the authenticity of the zone files are matched against other nodes in the network. It is, essentially, a DNS server that exists across multiple machines. The biggest downside to this particular approach is that it would be slower, but with caching this could be overcome.

The system would also not have to be mandatory. Comcast could have it's own DNS server with certain things blocked, Google might have it's own DNS with certain things blocked, but there would be these other options which have no single server and can not be shut down or blocked. You would "subscribe" to DNS servers the same way you subscribe to AdBlock lists.

This does fragment the Internet to some extent. Why can't System A access site B? Yeah, that will happen. But that ALREADY happens. If the decentralized DNS system is the best system, then everyone will use it and it's not so much of an issue.

The other alternative is changing the way we think about web service architecture, and implementing some kind of IPv6 hashing.

this makes me wonder how much different politics would be if we were simply not allowed to name the acts int he same manner we do. voting against a bill named "protecting children [insert anything here]" would make you completely villainized to the public. voting against "H.R.1981" would be much less toxic to your career just because nobody will remember the exact number in the long term.

Changing the name wouldn't matter. It would still be political suicide.

"Representative Adrian Brony voted AGAINST H.R.1981, a bill designed to PROTECT CHILDREN and STOP CHILD PORNOGRAPHY once and for all. Can we really trust a man who supports pedophilia and shelters sex offenders?"

Until we change the way we view sex offenders in the US this will always be an issue. As long as we think fo sex offenders as less than human, this issue will persist.

The system isn't really "corrupt". The system works as expected. The governments in the former Soviet satellites are corrupt. Every government in Africa is corrupt. The corruption in Russia is institutionalized.

The people in the US are undereducated and apathetic. They don't care. The political system simply operates on top of their indifference.

The people in the US are undereducated and apathetic. They don't care. The political system simply operates on top of their indifference.

I would also argue that the climate of the country is sometimes downright hostile to people who do care. Raising a fuss about civil liberties is seen as "rocking the boat" or "making a big deal out of nothing" because "yeah it could be abused, but it won't be."

I wont get into the whole view of sex offenders debate (i personally would not rest of someone touched my daughter, but public urination... WTF), but i think all of this shit could be solved if you americans could get bills back to single issue things. The fact that you have a new budget proposal for the military is all fine and all, but keep it at that, and dont tack some ridiculous shit on which changes the permissions.

Likewise, PCIP should be about protecting kids, not copyright, and anyone sneaking shit in under the radar should be put on trial for fraud.

I think we can only assume that this was done by design. I'm not even remotely surprised at our government with this one. They're greedy, ridiculous, manipulative, pricks who take advantage of the low average intelligence of their nation on a constant basis. This isn't okay, and until something is done to stop it it'll keep happening.

Dude, two years ago no one would have seriously believed Reddit would be central to organizing popular political campaigns with national scope and reach. We can do this. We need to keep hammering on them until we take back DCMA, force Mickey Mouse into the public domain, and get back to 14 years + 14 years of copyright.

Holy shit, I completely forgot about that bill. I remember bringing it up in my circle and was shocked when the majority if my friends were for it because they 'didnt want to chance letting pedophiles to run rampant.' These were guys who use to be 'libertarians' until they had kids.

We argued about it for a little bit but just from the tone I knew that those of us who were opposed to it were the minority and would not be able to sway their minds at that point.

Most of the other sides were the usual, predictable "if you had a little girl you would understand", "are you guys actually protecting pedophiles", etc.

I swear, most people have half their brain die and begin to rot once they have kids. It's like a switch turns and they go from laughing at the stupid "think of the children" emotional appeal to actually using it themselves.

The problem is that there is a certain evolutionary advantage that goes with being obsessed with the well-being of one's offspring. That advantage has ingrained this obsession so deep into our natural instincts that fighting it is spectacularly futile.

You really can't blame people for it, it's a good reason for the success of our species.

I certainly will continue to blame people who do horrible things in the name of the "children", they have no excuse. Plus if nobody calls them out, pretty much anything could get railroaded through in the name of the children (as if it doesn't already).

The ones who fall for it and get on board are understandable, but I feel it is the duty of those with the clear heads to point out when they are being emotional and irrational. Their clouded judgment may be understandable, but that doesn't make it any less harmful and incorrect. IF anything FAR more people need to put them in their place.

Fair enough, I'll give you that. The "For the children!" extension of our obsession with our kids is pretty much 100% harmful and of course, a terrible justification for the shit that flies under it.

I guess I was talking more on the individual level. I'm a relatively new parent myself, and my kid is more important to me than anybody and everybody else. I'd do tremendously selfish things to protect her.

That said, I'd only do those things if I thought they would help. Enacting silly legislation that moves a problem from one place to another instead of actually fixing it is not a fruitful endeavor.

To that end, I'll join you in blaming people who are not able to muster enough brain power to see when they are being manipulated by someone telling them their kids are in danger and can only be saved by their vote.

The biggest problem are things get pushed through that are hard to speak out against, while being very easy to pitch as being "for the children". The sex offender registry of course being the biggest example of that. A horrible overstep into abusing the rights of those we consider "rehabilitated", not to mention just plain stupid and ineffective, but such a huge feel good symbolic thing to irrationally concerned parents.

The most relevant example we are facing now is censorship. As someone else has said that is depressingly true, SOPA is just a smoke screen. The censorship wishes of the media execs will be pushed through in the name of stopping child pornography and not in the name of stopping piracy. They will give a mention to that sure, but they will be sure to mention it as being about child pornography 90% of the time. What politician would speak out against the "removal of child pornography"? None, even though anyone who values the freedom of our country would be insane not to.

If you could get the concerned parents of this country riled up enough I bet you could murder 10% of our population with little to no resistance.

What I don't understand is why use SOPA at all, then? If the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act is a sure pass why bother trying to push SOPA in? As a distraction? So people won't pay attention to the other bill? It's against child pornography... as you said, nobody gonna risk supporting child-pornography, so the distraction doesn't seems necessary?

They had a fifty-fifty chance at getting it through on its own. Give that a shot, if it doesn't get through then you've got the ultimate Plan B to fall back on which will work. But it's obvious when you go through the Plan B- everyone knows that you've played them, that there's nothing they can do. It has no stealth to it. It's an obvious move, an open declaration of war. If openly declaring war always worked every single time as an immediate end to conflict, why have the last few military wars been such a grey area of being on and off? Because playing the long game, with the stealth, works best.

I find it slightly ironic that the US, which formed out of a revolutionary war, quickly made revolution illegal. Obviously I can see the reason why they did, but it's interesting that we have such a strong stigma against sedition considering the history of the country to begin with.

The government does have a reset. It is written into the constitution. I can't remember well enough to tell you where. But try to convince everyone that something is wrong enough to do something that has never been done before.. Especially when none of them even think something is wrong.

After all, Facebook is some people's only source of news, and Facebook isn't doing anything today about SOPA or PIPA

The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.

Wrong man.

The error is that authoritarian/terrorist laws can pass just because they are "anti-child porn", that is what we have to fix. The DNS has to be centralized, there must be one architectural framework of the internet that is centralized. You cant decentralize DNS, then it looses all its meaning, what you have is just a name-to-ip mappnig by arbitrary standards - just the kind MPAA is pushing for! You cant have people runnin around spoofing DNS queries to thepiratebay to a childporn site, thats what a decentralized system would do, and thats exactly what MPAA wants to make of a perfectly fine system right now.

No my friends, the solution is and always will be societal, political. Laws are always above technology and always will be, dont delude yourself into thinking the magic bullet of technology can solve societal problems.

If a Congressman introduces the PCIPA with SOPA/PIPA tacked onto the end, is there anything stopping another Congressman from introducing the same bill without SOPA/PIPA, so that everyone in Congress is forced to make a choice between the two?

That way, any Congressman voting for the PCIPA/SOPA/PIPA bill makes it very clear that he would willingly vote for each individually, and we can raise the shitstorm flags again until only the PCIPA is passed.

I agree with everything you're saying, but I don't see why we can't stop both SOPA and PCIP and any further attempts to censor the internet. Ron Wyden successfully blocked a previous SOPA-style bill in the Senate that was explicitly targeted at child pornography.

I don't believe that child pornography is the holy grail of censorship, the one political frame that no one can escape. At the worst, it's more difficult. But in reality, all one has to point out is that none of these bills is likely to stop either child pornography or piracy on the internet, so really all they accomplish is censorship.

That said, yeah, the ultimate solution is indeed an internet that is resilient to these kinds of attacks. We should probably move this direction and make the whole political debacle obsolete.

Sounds like how they used NDAA to push indefinite detention through. The NDAA is a must pass. Except, not in the same way PCIP is. PCIP is a must pass because if you don't vote yes, well then you must support child porn. NDAA had to pass because shit starts imploding in very nasty ways if it doesn't.

Sorry, still a little bitter that it is apparently acceptable for things to be added on to must pass legislation at the last second so it can't be fought against.

Someone may have already asked this and it may have been answered but I couldnt find it in the comments... but if this bill is tacked to the end of the PCIP bill and someone comes on my site and posts a download link to a copy of Star Wars. Would I then be charged under the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornography" law?

What I am getting at is, if this goes though could people potentially go to jail labeled as child pornographers because someone else posted a link on their website that had nothing to do with child porn?

This is sort of how it happened in Denmark. It was passed by law, all domestic ISP's should implement a DNS filter, based on a list of sites containing child porn. The list is maintained by the Danish Police.
Even early on there were problems; sites that did not contain CP ended up on the list with no warning or trial.

A few years later allofmp3.com came along, and since the infrastructure was already in place - it was just added to the list.
The Pirate Bay has since been added as well.

So now we have a system, where any site can be censored, without any trial or warning. It's not great :/

1) What bills were struck down in 93-94? All I can remember in the 90s was that the Communications Decency Act passed and parts were overturned by the Supreme Court. Then COPA came along and started an all new cluster fuck.

2) There really was no internet in 1993. At least, nothing that resembles the internet today.

The passing of the CDA showed just how easy it is to pass something like an anti-child pornography bill. They passed an internet obscenity law before most people even had access to the internet. Hell, it wasn't even really called the internet back then, it was still "cyberspace".

We need to start formulating arguments against it that the general public may accept, but right now spreading awareness is probably the best thing we can do. We want to set the stage of the debate before it starts.

People should know that this is a very real possibility, and it would be a direct attack on the freedom of the American people.

look at how much awareness there is of SOPA right now, even with the blackouts. No one reports it because the media is own by supporters. PCIP may be reported, but as the best thing ever, and anyone who opposes it will be (incorrectly) call paedophile supporters...

This is an american governmental proposition, and hoenstly I think more people know about it internationally, than americans...

Yeah, I don't think decentralizing DNS is the answer guys. Unless you want to come up with an alternative to DNS, centralized DNS is NOT an "error" it is by design to prevent DNS poisoning. Now I'm not saying that it's not something that can be thought about, but we must understand that decentralizing the DNS system as we know it would produce bad results, results just as bad as a post-SOPA internet if not far more malicious.

The alternative in my eyes is to have centralized static open dns that isn't under control of american copyright law. I mean I'm pretty sure this already exists. I think we should have global centralized DNS, just outside of the legal reach of the government (which they have no business controlling anyway).

Isn't this what happened in Denmark fairly recently? Perhaps it was Norway, I can't remember exactly. What happened was the government passed a law by which web sites could be censored/blocked (á la China's "Great Firewall"), in order to protect people from child pornography, stating outright that it would never be used to censor anything else, and was simply a protective measure.

Since then, they've gradually started using it to censor other sites, including filesharing and other pornographic material. Always with the excuse that they're "protecting" the people.

They can, and very well might, copy and paste the full text of SOPA to the end of PCIP. That's the backup.

THEY DON'T NEED ATTACH ANYTHING TO IT BECAUSE THE IMPORTANT PART IS ALREADY IN THERE

‘Sec. 1960A. Financial facilitation of access to child pornography
‘(a) In General- Whoever knowingly conducts, or attempts or conspires to conduct, a financial transaction (as defined in section 1956(c)) in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowing that such transaction will facilitate access to, or the possession of, child pornography (as defined in section 2256) shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

BUT ANY WEBSITE IN THE WORLD ALREADY that facilitates user input also can be abused to facilitate copyrighted material and/or child porn covertly. and by nature of the internet it is ridiculous to pass sopa and related bills due to this fact - for proof please see my post here

This is ridiculous doom-saying at best. Granted you can't support child pornography, but you really think we won't be able to raise a ruckus as to the fact that the bill's name is incredibly misleading? This is almost as bad as the evangelicals on the corner preaching that the world is ending.

I understand the sentiment behind what you're talking about and I understand that this is the way things may play out in YOUR head (your user name is owsmanifesto to further prove my point) but you (and those that think like you) need to take a step back and realize how radical you are being. There are no ultimatums and things are NOT as starkly black and white as you seem to believe. Copy/pasting the SAME TEXT from a bill that just shook the internet into another misleadingly named bill and saying its guaranteed to pass? Come on...

They do it now with "terrorist". Anything they want passed goes through if it's to fight terrorism. FFS, they've blatantly circumvented the Constitution with NDAA and vague references to terrorists, and you don't think they can ram legislation through that has kiddie porn as it's supposed raison d'etre?

need to start creating a list of all the bills that were snuck in under other bills disuised or hidden. people need to get there shit together and start giving and PROVING reasons why the people in power dont deserve to be there.

first law of political rhetoric, the response to an attack has to be more succinct than the attack, thats why everything in politics boils down to tiny soundbites. It doesnt get any shorter than "For The Children". Well, you could try "NO U" but I dont think it would fly.

I get that it's possible to copy and paste SOPA into PCIP, but won't anyone take notice? There's easily enough opposition to SOPA to re-amend the bill before taking a vote is taken on it.

Also,

The MPAA and RIAA started working on their legislative strategy to pass a new anti-piracy bill in late 2010. SOPA was designed to raise the noise. Everyone is playing right into the entertainment industries hand.

It seems to me the more fundamental fix is to require every bill to have a clear, singular purpose, and if it doesn't, require that it be split into separate bills for separate votes. All this business of tacking completely orthogonal stuff onto "must pass" bills is always how the worst, most pernicious, most bought-and-paid-for legislation gets through.

I understand that doing so would be messy and hard to define. But some attempt at doing so would have to be better than how it works now.

Sounds like we need to do the best we can to label this bill as SOPA-2.

Do not let anyone assert that this is about CP. Always turn any argument into something about how it's really SOPA-2. Whenever they try to steer it back to CP, call them liars and steer it back to SOPA-2. Stay on topic.

Hi, Australian here. A politician here is trying to "filter" the Internet in the name of preventing access to child pornography (in reality preventing access to any material that has been Refused Classification by the classification board, which is virtually everything).

Anyway he's been pushing for this legislation for over a year now and it's still not happening, and he's got the entire industry and a large body of the public telling him to fuck right off, so just because something claims to be "in the name of the children" doesn't mean people are going to be blinded to the reality of the legislation.

I'd disagree with them catching up with technology... They understand it's a threat, and that the DNS name server is basis of the internet - but it has been for the past 20 years. Ultimately they oppose any technology that doesn't lower their costs/raise their revenues or help support their own monopolistic practices. They don't understand technology - they understand marketing (or more realistically, propaganda).

My argument against this is, children cannot and do not pay the internet bill, hence why should the internet have anything to do with children is my point. It's the parent's responsibility not to leave the child and internet alone together.

if SOPA was 10x worse and locked down DNS under the control of the music/movie industries, it wouldn't matter against a browser that did p2p DNS or retrieved some list of DNS on it's own that didn't rely on the current DNS infrastructure.

So we first move to a different centralized DNS. Then that gets taken down. The browser could coordinate with a central server to retrieve the next "valid" DNS, but what happens when that central server gets taken down?

So we'll switch to P2P DNS, but what happens when someone begins poisoning the DNS pool with bad entries? DNS is centralized for a good reason -- we take for granted that when we type in "facebook.com", someone is actually giving us the correct IP for facebeook.com.

Not saying this is going to happen, but it's the first thing I thought of when reading your comment.

It did not pass in Germany. They tried to do the exact same thing - increase their ability for censorship by claiming to work against child pornography. And yes, everybody that spoke out against it immediately was put in the pedophile corner. But they persisted and showed that the idea in itself was stupid, because child pornography does not disappear because you put a veil over it. The law has been shelved and no one even talks about it anymore. Plus, the pirate party rose out of this disaster and has been getting more votes than some of the established parties in some communities. So, not all hope is lost.

This is.....wow....just....pure evil.
Holy crap man. I'm not even FROM or NEAR the US and I am terrified. They will stop at no lenghts it seems to control the internet.

Maybe it's indeed time to change the infrastructure and declare an international, possibly immune organ of control over it?
Internet as become much more than just a technical network of computers, it has shaped and will shape the future.

There was/is a very similiar situation in Australia regarding internet censorship. It was proposed to protect children from internet predators by blocking a list of sites that were thought to be connected to child pornography and as suggested above this made it basically impossible for any politician to do anything but support it.

Wikileaks leaked the list and I believe almost every ip that would be blocked were of political nature and some of compaines in competition with those supporting the legislation.

I don't have a good understanding of the structure behind our dns based internet so hopefully a tech savy redditor can teach me a thing or two here. Are things used in china/ iran etc. like freenet/ tor/ I2P decentralised or would they fail under proposed dns blocks?